Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

He sounded indulgent of her, but that didn’t change the fact that “affected little goose” was quite an affected thing to say in and of itself. We got to the top of the queue, and, as usual, Tijana ordered salad in a bap, which I continued to consider a pointless choice. She eyed me sternly, daring me to say anything as she opened the bap and splashed chilli sauce all over the inside of it. I talked. I touched on a variety of subjects unrelated to Miranda Silver — the parallels between hall food and the meals served in old people’s homes, the fact that getting drunk was already boring, concerns surrounding my inability to actually answer either of the essay questions I’d been set so far.

Tijana took one of my chips and said, “Miranda was at my old school.”

“Not friends?”

Tijana said, “No,” and she smiled at her own seriousness.

At college, my inability to sleep became terrible. Very quickly I learnt to seek Tijana out late at night. There were other people that I had begun talking to, people on my course, people who lived on my staircase and swapped CDs with me, but no one I could legitimately ask to climb graveyard gates at 4:00 AM with me for Fortean experiments in spirit photography. No one but Tijana, who yanked her hair up out of her face in a Buffy-esque ponytail and said, “Let’s go.”

She trembled all over as the notched shadow of the church fell on her, but she kept her hands steady enough to set my tripod up properly. She insisted on setting the tripod up, as if my doing it would somehow skew the results. We drank sugared tea from flasks and talked and measured each other’s Nosferatu-like shadows while the camera clicked serenely and independently.

Once I rolled her onto her back on the grass and looked into her face to learn her opinion about that. She laughed. I kissed her. She kissed me back, hard, and wrapped her legs around me as if she wanted to climb up me. Her skin was fever hot. When I kissed her neck I felt her breath catch in her throat. She rolled me over and sat up on top of me, and we kissed and fumbled with buttons and put hands and lips to bare skin until one or the other of us said, “I can’t,” and if it was me I don’t know why because I wanted to. Maybe I’m just remembering it wrongly to help me get over the rejection.

Once before I have been the scared one, in a best friendship brought from primary school to secondary school. It was the hugest secret that Catriona and I had ever had. It had to be. Adorned with yin-yang “best friend forever” necklaces and whatever else glittered on the racks of Claire’s Accessories we were, are, Faversham girls. By the time she and I were nine we were using the word “dyke” as a deep insult, even though our parents told us not to — we’d even use it on boys. There was something in the way my mum would say, “Don’t say that,” that let me know that calling someone a fat dyke wasn’t as bad as swearing.

Cat had red hair and so did her brother, Paddy, who kept chatting me up. Red hair didn’t work on Paddy. The first kiss with Cat might have been in a public place — at the cinema, I think. It’s hard to say because I was so scared that it felt as if we were kissing in front of everyone every time. I let Cat go farther and farther with me, and I touched her as little as possible. She allowed that poor love of mine. It was the dread that comes about when you are allowed to have something that seems costly and yet you’re not asked for payment.

In Narnia a girl might ring a bell in a deserted temple and feel the chime in her eyes, pure as the freeze that forces tears. Then when the sound dies out, the White Witch wakes. It was like, I want to touch you, and I can touch you, now what next, a dagger?

The thing with Cat took about a year to grow, and about a week to be finished. The whole thing was so intense, so full of hurt that when I look back at it I squint. I want it forgotten. Not the way she was — she brought her body to mine with this strange and shocking innocence, when she came the first time she said “I love you” into my ear, words convulsive and unintended, not needing a reply. It’s the way that I was that needs forgetting. I behaved like a boy or something. The ending was clumsy and stupid and the friendship couldn’t survive it.

Tijana and I stuck to Scrabble and neutral talk on the other nights. She worked at essays, her flashlight steady between the gravestones as she crashed through her reading list hundreds of pages at a time, marking significant lines with sticky index tabs. She was not easily distracted; when it was her turn at Scrabble, she looked up from her notes and I could feel the words she’d just read still migrating from the pages and into her.

The guy who’d sat on the other side of Tijana at matric dinner came up to me while I was in the computer room and started talking about this and that. I kept my answers brief and shrugged a lot. Finally, he came to his point.

“Tijana’s probably got a boyfriend, hasn’t she,” he said. He still seemed like a fool to me. A low-key fool, but a fool all the same. So I said “Yeah.” Actually I didn’t know. Did she? Maybe at home.

The University Library is a mouth shut tight, each tooth a book, each book growing over, under and behind the other. The writing desks are placed in front of bookshelves, some of them between bookshelves so that whoever is sitting at the desk gets a feeling of something dusty, intangible and unspeakably powerful, something like God, watching them through tiny gaps in the shelves. People kept trooping past the desk I’d chosen, in search of books and free seats, and within half an hour I’d stopped looking up when someone passed. I wanted to read about the soucouyant. I wanted to write about her, I still do. What do I want to write? Just a book, probably, another tooth for the UL’s mouth. Something that explores the meaning of the old woman whose only interaction with other people was consumption. The soucouyant who is not content with her self. She is a double danger — there is the danger of meeting her, and the danger of becoming her. Does the nightmare of her belong to everyone, or just to me?

After a listless half hour flipping through critical essays on Dracula , I went in search of the likeliest-looking soucouyant-related titles that came up on the computer. I found Miranda at a desk beside a staircase on one of the wings. She had her head down, and her hair blackened the pages of her opened book. I thought she was sleeping, but as I came closer I saw that her eyes were open and she was looking sideways at me. I said, “Whoa,” before I could check myself.

“Hello Ore.” She didn’t sit up. Maybe she couldn’t actually bring herself to. She hadn’t even taken her coat off.

“How’s it going,” I said. She was much too thin. She was serene, like someone accustomed to sickness, someone who lay back to back with it in bed. For a second her face made no sense to me. Her enormous eyes, the curve of her lips, they locked me out. I couldn’t imagine ever touching her.

She smiled with a scary energy, as if she had been told to at gun-point. She said she wished she could sleep more.

I looked around for a seat, so I wouldn’t have to stand up and crick my own neck in order to see her properly.

She’s unreal,

she’s an affected little goose

The nearest empty seat was two bookshelves away. I tucked the three books I had under my arm (I looked too studious just holding them) and stayed standing.

“I haven’t been sleeping that well either,” I told her.

She didn’t say anything and I racked my brains to fill the silence, but before I could add to what I’d said, she said, “I think it is the moon.” She said the words softly, to some tune of her own devising, and she drew the word “moon” out for a long moment. It was so odd and unnecessary that something told me that I had to proceed carefully.